What does a place-based backbone team do and how is it distinctly different?

What is a backbone team?

A backbone team is the dedicated group of people whose job is to be glue, weaving and holding collaboration together. What is distinct about this team is what it isn’t, its not there to deliver the frontline services, its not a program facilitation team... they are focused on the work that to often sits beyond the remit of programs, services and teams. The work that people and teams see the need for but rarely if ever have the capacity, time or skills for.

Their job is to make sure the schools, health services, councils, community organisations, and funders working on a shared local problem stay pointed in the same direction, share the same data, and don’t quietly duplicate or undercut each other’s work.

Chatting to one of my colleagues who things about all the Legal stuff… they always hate the name backbone, theres the running joke, ‘who even came up with the name backbone team!?!’…. Well the idea came from a 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article on “collective impact,” it named the idea of backbone support as one of five elements or conditions needed for cross-sector efforts to actually work and align — alongside a common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, and continuous communication. Thinking has evolved from the origins of ‘Collective Impact’, however the distinct and different role of a ‘backbone’ has been evidenced to be seen as increasingly critical. Someone needs to hold focus on, responsibility for, and dedicate intentional time towards coordination, being the connective breeze or tissue, gathering the data and listening deep and deeper, creating the environment for balanced power and purposeful direction.

In Australia, organisations like Collaboration for Impact have spent the past decade adapting this thinking to local conditions, and it’s worth sitting with how they describe the role: backbone teams are “the engine room” of a collaborative change effort. They live and breathe the work — and the health — of the collaboration, staying grounded in the shared agenda while also scanning the horizon for what’s coming next. One foot on the dance floor, one foot on the balcony.

Who are in a backbone?

Look honestly there isn’t a one size fits all answer to this. Perhaps thats why this is one of the biggest questions I get asked. Who IS the backbone team?

There’s no universal staffing template or set roles that need to be in a backbone team, but a few common roles are common:

• A coordinator or lead facilitator — Focuses on the big picture and direction, focuses on trust power and the relationships, chairs the table that people are coming around and ensures it is balanced and representative, keeps the collaboration moving and is using adaptive leadership and strategy.

  
  

• Cultural and Community co-designer - Brings the skill of innovation and co-design that translates ideas and needs into tested actions to scale, with the nuance of deep understanding and skill in cultural and community ways. This role or focus brings together cultural ways, community connection, synthesis and analysis of insights, and developing solutions collectively through power-sharing rather than external and done to.

  
  

• A communications or engagement role — Focuses on deep and deeper listening, building pathways of engagement that move the broader community from purely consultation into sitting at the table and in shared decision-making. This role is often working across the partners, the community, people with lived experience, and working groups as they pop up, keeping everyone informed and involved.

  
  

• A data or evaluation lead — Is thinking about all things shared measurement, learning to inform next steps, and monitoring progress and change over time. Critical to this is taking the information coming in and translating it, and sharing it so information is fuelling iterative change.

  
  

  Beyond position titles and domains, the ‘hidden’ yet critical work of all of the backbone is easily more than half of the job. It includes:

  • Holding the emotional container for a group of people who don’t report to each other but have a shared investment and interest in seeing change. This is particularly true in times of crisis, when issues emerge despite the energy and actions to prevent it, and in the dynamics of working together in different ways

  • Facilitating through genuine conflict, challenge and complexity. Backbones work through the challenges rather than rushing smoothing it over or avoiding it as this IS the work

  • Building trust one relationship at a time, often invisibly, long before any formal agreement gets signed. Ask any backbone and they will tell you that the milestone moment was 18 months in the making.

  • Staying resilient and optimistic when fatalism creeps into the room — because someone has to hold the vision when others start to doubt it

  • Influencing the conditions for change without having formal authority over any of the partners, moving within systems and structures to influence, disrupt, and create the environment for real change.

What are the types of backbone structure?

Just as there isn’t any one key role, theres also no single blueprint for how a backbone is structured — and the right structure tends to depend on what already exists locally, who’s willing to fund it, and how much independence the work needs.

There isn’t even necessarily a right or wrong model, but rather pros and cons to different set ups. For example…

The discrete (or stand-alone) backbone operates as its own distinct entity, sometimes with its own charitable status, board, and staff, sitting outside all of the partner organisations. The benefit is that this set up as neutrality — no partner can accuse the backbone of favouring “its own” agenda because it sits in the third space. However it often takes longer to establish, and needs to focus some attention on its own functioning and funding base to survive.

The volunteer backbone is an all-volunteer group of community leaders driving the shared and collective work forward. Roles such as fiscal host for revenue, reporting, leadership and facilitation are held be different members based either on skill or capacity. This model is often the base of many local programs, from churches to local groups and carries real legitimacy and local buy-in, with an agile and adaptive approach that is driven by who is able to be involved through passion and perseverance. However, it can also be fragile, reliant on volunteer capacity, may struggle with core skills for naunced or time-bound aspects of the work, and momentum can stall when people’s day jobs, health or life stages pull them away. That said, I feel this version of backbone is undervalued and has so much potential, because it removes ghost agendas and external pressures and instead centres local change first and foremost.

The nested backbone often looks like a small team of staff — often somewhere between two to four people, housed or hosted inside one of the partner organisations, which acts as the fiscal host. The benefit of this is that it is relatively fast to establish, cheaper to run by way of the incidentals being picked up by the host, and can fall back on the larger host organisation. However, neutrality can often be a challenge to hold and may be an underlying elephant in the room, likewise in a work that is intentionally collaborative how does that impact other organisations around the table?

The seconded backbone. Staff remain employed by an existing organisation but are seconded — part-time or full-time — specifically to build and run the backbone infrastructure. A common example is a dedicated role from Local Government for 1 year to work as catalyst to get things going. The benefits are that the host organisation carries the salary and support costs, its a light-weight way to get dedicated capacity without a new legal entity and can easily include 2 or 3 organisations all providing a seconded role into a co-opt backbone. The challenge of this is that these are often short-term bursts and require clarity around accountability along the way.

The funder-based or hybrid model is growing in Australia, it involves a funder initiating and also facilitating the coordinating backbone function itself, at least in the early stages, with the intent of transitioning it to the community or other suitable infrastructure or even government programming in time. The benefit is close connection from funding to accountability and enables strong relational funding models that can be responsive to the evolving agenda of the community and grow as momentum grows. The challenge exists in ensuring a backbone, intended as being as local as possible, is local and grounded in accountability to community.

Another model? I can’t help wondering whether the opportunity to innovate a further model exists, a model that recognises that skills, people and programs already have embedded roles easily repurposed for backbones, but sit limited by contractual and programatic constraints. Is there a model where more funding and more investors isn’t needed, rather imagination and systems shifts rather than jostling for whether to add more. What do you think this might look like in your context?

In deciding which model is best for your community and context, think about the interplay of time, pace, trust and accountability. What is most important for your community and context and what are you already building on?

Questions to ponder… 

It can feel like a lot of information to navigate, what structure to orientate towards, what roles to embed when funding is tight at best, whats benefits does a project or community need and what challenges do we need to avoid at all costs. Support to navigate these and form or refine is important along this way… in the meantime here are a few questions to ponder. FYI Some of these won’t have comfortable answers… That’s rather the point perhaps.

1. If your collaboration lost its funding tomorrow, what would partners actually miss? Is it the strategy, the data, or simply having someone who holds the relationships together?

2. Who are you actually accountable to at the end of the day or year? — the host organisation, the collaborative table, the community, or the funder? What happens when those interests diverge or have friction points?

3. How much of your week is spent on the invisible work — trust-building, holding tension, adaptive facilitation — versus the visible work that shows up in a report? Is that balance sustainable?

4. If a partner quietly checked out of the collaboration, would you notice in week one, or month six?

5. Whose voice is missing from the table, and what would it take to bring it in — not as a stakeholder to consult, but as a partner with real influence?

6. Are you the container for change, or have you quietly become the decision-maker? Where’s the line, and does everyone at the table agree on where it sits?

7. What would it look like to make yourself gradually unnecessary? A backbone that’s still indispensable after ten years may be a sign the collaboration hasn’t built its own muscle for collective action.